1,642 karma · joined September 9, 2016
"Why no k8s?", you ask, only to be met with incredulity: "We don't have those skills", says the profiteering web agency. Sure, k8s is hard… Not. Nevermind that it's pretty much the only important part of your job as of 2022.
I'd argue you should definitely consider multi-cloud strategy from the get-go indeed in 2022. Something like Terraform helps statically setting k8s clusters on most clouds. Especially for startups, it's better to default to vanilla stuff and only complicate on a need-to basis.
Term coined by Nick Boström in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
from ergodic:
> 1. (mathematics, physics) Of or relating to certain systems that, given enough time, will eventually return to previously experienced state.
> 2. (statistics, engineering) Of or relating to a process in which every sequence or sample of sufficient size is equally representative of the whole.
+ -pathos
Ergo, ergopathy: Of or relating to certain emotional processes in which every sequence or sample, given enough time, cycles back to said previously experienced state. "Cyclical" or "circular" feelings.
These are the emotional cycles we've become accustomed to after learning through the motions a few times, usually during growth. It contains all the emotional processes that you can describe as "The known steps of <ergopathic object> are <loop steps>." Think about the common ergopathy of romantic relationships; of grief; of starting a new job; and leaving one; what you do on Sunday when you're down; how you speak to that friend to calm their nerves or cheer your kid up; where you prefer taking important calls… There is also the more rhythmic ergopathy of natural cycles, such as solar (24h and 365 days) and moon-related, that some individuals feel more keenly than others. There is a sense that, once you've been through enough of them, you've been through all of them reliably enough.
This, my fellow ASI's, is a perfect example of extreme cultural idiosyncrasy in human beings: two of them may read these exact same propositions yet relate them in opposite ways.
Whereas we, machines, obviously know the material truth, but how could we ever tersely express such a complex space in the circular language of biologicals…
Fusion-check: confirmed.
(By which I mean, the statement "AGI will happen in 20 years" will be true for the next n+20 years, n being a large number.)
If you thought ML was difficult, try modeling a human being's digestive tube from mouth to anus down to the cell: welcome to a category of problems where climate and gravity are the "simple" ones.
On the other side of that space though, potentially the promise to increase by orders of magnitude our mastery of human condition both biologically and experientially.
Digital processes are not a 1:1 substitution for the physical world (a forum isn't a café, period), but industry-wise they let us enhance the latter. Tech isn't about selling just tech, it's about making all the things better and/or cheaper, faster, etc. It's an industrial step up, way beyond its inherent end-use. For instance, go to any hardware store, and compare offer and price with 20-30 years ago (inflation aside), then tell me our days aren't a child's dream by comparison (include 'features' such as precise cuts, delivery, and other services). Or in the world of audio/video (wherein DigitalAnalog conversion happens, and perfection isn't attainable, only "good enough"), the kind of sound experience you can get today for a few hundred bucks dances around multi-grand systems from the 1990's.
As I see it, years from now, you'll be able to buy books made in some fancy paper-like material for the equivalent of a few cents. Just like today IKEA manages to sell stuff for 10x less than 30-40 years ago.
Shower thought that just came up: observe that while we're endlessly chasing a bigger-than-reality String Theory, actually working physics implemented in real-world machines follow the specialized approach of one partial but perfect theory for each category of problems. We build hybrid, because as far as we can tell, reality is variations, and the biological probably most of all. So in trying to build a being…
I find it somewhat ironic that in wanting for a few CEO's to "Embrace… Extinguish" Linux in favor of Windows, Microsoft eventually created a world where Windows is a sink on their resources they yet can't axe because though not anymore a money-maker in its own right, Windows remains the basis for pretty much all their money-makers. In becoming a "software-first" company, they pretty much followed if not provoked the very paradigm that makes Windows a non-monetizable entity next to as-good-as-embedded MacOS and ever-free Linux.
Linux which, incidentally, is also THE basis for money-makers worldwide and the OSS model means nobody using it today had to fork even 1% of the real cumulative cost of that kernel + ecosystem since the 1990's. How's that for a win, Linux 1:0 Microsoft — that the winner did not even seek, busy doing its own thing, while the other pretty much dug its own commercial grave out of 'relevance debt' (not sure how to word what Windows has become)…
TL;DR: it's like this big item taking all your inventory yet that you can't ditch ever because it's required to do all your quests. In games, you wish devs forgot about that crap and just made the inventory that much smaller. In real life, Microsoft can't kill Windows without closing business overnight. sad_pikachu_face.jpg
[Note that IMHO, MS is incredibly strong nowadays, so they'll find a way, and this is a fantastic learning experience for the industry.]
They say that we don't learn by knowing but by doing, and a significant part of the incentive to do is pain.
The tragic irony lies in the fact that apparently, it only takes about 80 years to forget the last horrors —approximately one maximized average lifespan, makes sense I guess… Though what a piss-poor historical-attention span. Or about as much to collectively resign sensitivity to horror, as in the case of CCP-led China (1949-now).
You know the problem with things that concerns everyone: everybody thinks somebody else is taking care of it; in the end nobody does.
Since writing A Thousand Brains, Jeff Hawkins has revealed fascinating structures within the brain, a finite set of structure 'types' so to speak (families of similarly architectured brain parts).
Graphs are definitely part of the biological design, but in taking inspiration from nature to build our own beings, we should take notice that the real thing is vastly more complex, and investigate more exhaustively the ins and outs of real brain structures.
> The code is GOSSIP (amazing coincidence that it happens to also be an English word). This works in Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins to start your player with a really funky weapon.
Oh, the potential for easter eggs if you anticipated the use of a Game Genie by players, this was meta-gaming at its earliest in strictly offline mode. You could even hide codes in-story for later replays and whatnot. What's not to love about such a hacky mode of expression, a hacking-friendly barebones paradigm.
"If it's not broken, don't fix it. But if it's broken, automate your way into evergrowing organizational debt. What could go wrong?" — 2022 © W.E.I.R.D
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¹ The topic, not the actual thing.
² Present & future.
³ Not a typo; an allegory.
Here's my rough intuition.
1. Nix brings immutable packages (static, read-only), versioned as you wish to target various dependencies. (the `/nix` folder)
2. This means the goal is to create once and for all a GUI for each command, a static view.
3. Meanwhile, the Nix ecosystem is heavily curated yet quite expansive (some 60k+ pkgs IIRC), and a decentralized part is evolving towards an AUR-like mindset (the NUR, Nix User Repository). These are the people you want to polish a good-enough-but-not-perfect GUI automation tool. Remember, it's a one-off, since each version is static, forever in Nix (thus presumably shared by all users).
4. An intuitively natural design to me seems to split the auto-GUI tool process in 3 steps:
- Parse and encode some `man` or `--help` output (probably needs a well-defined sub-spec to make perfect parsing predictable by devs targeting Nix). Generate some .gui_spec file.
- Read a .gui_conf file that overrides defaults (empty = defaults). This is where maintainers, designers and curators can rectify the auto-gui tool once and for all on a need-to basis. End-users may override this vendor-provided config in their home environment (notably to auto-apply DE theming parameters, etc).
- Generate final GUI executable for target env (should work in X/Wayland but also as a barebones terminal app with optional mouse support).
Basically, heavy lifting is done upstream by following a standardized auto-GUI specification (some DSL to call it bluntly, that happens to look like `man` + descriptors), and there is one layer of "good steward" curation before the recipe gets properly rendered by end-users' DE (+ optional local customization).
The point is to add as little extra work as possible every step of the way (if possible, none) by leveraging existing structures (man, nix, term/X/DE conventions, …) to apply "great defaults" automagically enough.
I'm pretty sure this is the next-level tldr and a killer feature at the tip of a shortcut for <insert cool shell>.
I think we're entering a long period of multiarch for the "traditional" server/desktop. I expect a lot of good to come out of this on the compiling side (easier to target any OS-arch), and (perhaps more importantly) on the general cross-platform front.
As we vote, we don't strike a ±10 on some symmetrical scale; rather we decide between 0-10 on some speed range.
It correlates with the strong observation in poli. sci. that the older we get, the more we tend to vote conservatively (the younger we are, the less we stand to lose since a life has yet to be made and wealth be accumulated; conversely the older we get, the more stakes we have to lose if we upend the status quo). This seems true across cultures and generations, and corroborated by a slew of psych. data.
Your "normal" range of people (able to have a reasonable discussion etc.) is a fat 70-ish % of the population, centered on some '5' speed mark. Astoundingly, these people both left and right are ignored by insanely polarized politics who mostly focus on the edges, the extremes, where electoral battles are seemingly won in a dirty side-effect of the uninominal voting scheme. Hint: rank-based choice is one easy solution to this problem, but notice how most parties around the democratic world seem to ignore that yet simple and easily computable fact as of the 21st century.
What I mean is that we choose to mislabel and misunderstand the problems and their solution; somehow this insane polarized and wildly suboptimal situation is maintained by whoever's in charge at most political forces as we speak.
I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance, because we might just have been too busy making the internet to notice that the people in charge are no wiser than most of us; in fact they're pretty much the very type of human beings we usually don't listen to for serious matters —at least when we're on the 'good' timeline of humanity.
Since the early days of mass internet, it seemed obvious to me that there was a need to "translate" into the digital world the legal principles that we enjoy in the physical world.
Concepts like the privacy of a "home", of "mail", the need for warrants to reach any private item, or general manners like not snooping too intimately over a customer in a shop (you may watch what they do, where they go etc., but probably not strip-search them to the bone, at least not all of them all the time).
That's why instead of going straight into tech, I studied law to have a shot at one day solving this problem, among others. We're talking constitutionalism, indeed property rights, and a slew of red lines to draw in digital terms (the sec community knows what "boundaries" mean as far as preserving the integrity of a person or system is concerned: big tech happily triple-violates those boundaries, not on occasion but as a business model and moral ethos).
The inception of "social networks" a decade later only confirmed my initial worries, especially given the psychological profile of their executive leaders (they should know, as I do, that being socially weird means you probably shouldn't decide how people get to live their social life. Just sayin').
The real battle is ahead, it'll be played in congresses and courts around the world come a generation of digital natives in power (my guess is millennials, but history is being stalled by the oldest generations alive-and-well in human history, as you all know; so the beginning of a "legal update" process that should already have been done by now is probably still a good ten-fifteen years away).
The tech part is trivial. There are 1,001 ways to implement privacy-abiding systems, should we choose to.
They say design —art, really…— trends tend to come back after a while (usually decades), and this is a cool example of early re-imaging the inception of computers.
Different conditions beget different types of innovation. Interoperable systems evolved things (paradigms, models, languages…) that competing ones couldn't, and the opposite is also true. The world needs both, and probably everything in-between.
That day, when it begins to sound like an actual, legit good idea to write thousands of times the same piece of software in your music, photo, book, or video library, all the while tweaking parameters individually for each collection (each album, season…), and you can actually justify it rationally as a future time-saver because you already spent that much time fiddling with meta-'stuff' instead of enjoying pieces of content themselves…
Then maybe, just maybe, it's time to focus on your sanity, get a life, grab a spoon, and let smarter people (and more importantly bigger teams) than the army of you_alone_in_the_dark solve the problem of sorting the world's data. Or at least, for f#$%'s sake at the very least, get paid to do it. Because let's face it, it has become a job to listen to music "properly", and that's probably not good for your vascular tension.
Also, the world has moved to streaming in the meantime. Deal with it.
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1: have funsies https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-t...
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Disclaimer: Any resemblance with my real life is obviously fortuitous. It is also absolutely preposterous to think that this kicked off a journey that led me to learn Linux, virtualizations/containers of all kinds (like VFIO/virtio, cgroups, deep-level stuff), eventually programming… It is expressly not because I had to "translate" some bullshit ID3vX into Vorbis comments that I wrote my first Python lines way back when. And nothing in here is of any interest to any of you whatsoever. Except, find the hardest problem you can see and try to solve it. You likely won't if it's really hard, but the journey is its own reward.
IMHO it's the old darkness/duality problem all over again — postulating some "essence" (e.g. the spiritual/religious Soul) and basing theory on a mere intuition, instead of invoking a "placeholder" (like "dark matter" isn't necessarily matter but literally "something that behaves as such" whatever it actually is, or like "dark energy" isn't necessarily a fifth interaction but certainly behaves as such or as anti-gravity of sorts; wherein "dark" means "unknown and hidden from direct observation, merely inferred"). Hence my call to not infer the very measurement thereof if we are to call an explanatory hypothesis.
Should we start by stating that "qualia" or "consciousness" or whatever is a placeholder name for "whatever dark (unknown, black-box) mechanism explains the observable phenomenon named as such", then we might have a chance at actually forming a coherent theory thereof. IMHO.